After running out of legal options to resist, Google bowed to the EU’s privacy-related push to help people to keep out of the public eye. Since May, Europeans have been able to ask for links to “irrelevant, outdated or otherwise inappropriate” content to be pulled.

This all came about after the EU’s top court rejected Google’s arguments and told it to take down links to a Spanish notice of a home auction. Sounds simple, put like that. But in reality, the EU Court of Justice’s decision on the “right to be forgotten” has exposed a tangle of privacy rights, censorship worries, cross-border jurisdiction and corporate compliance.

In fact, the case shows how far there’s still to go in setting the ground rules for online services such as Google and Facebook
/quotes/zigman/9962609/delayed/quotes/nls/fbFB, even as they’ve become part of daily lives. Here’s a look at some of the main strands in that tangle, and what needs to be sorted out.

First, though: What’s happened now?
Engineers spent the night overhauling Google’s infrastructure so the relevant links could be pulled, and on Thursday, the company started sending emails to inform people whose “right to be forgotten” requests were successful.

About a month ago, Google set up an online form (here) for people to submit details, including the links to be removed and the reasons why. It said the details would be looked at by people, not algorithms, with the first takedowns expected in mid-June — so Thursday’s move is pretty much on schedule.

So they’ll take down every link there’s a request for?
No, it only applies to applications from Europeans, and they’ll only disappear from results on EU sites, such as google.co.uk.

On top of this, the decision on whether to pull a link down will depend on the circumstances.

“When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information — for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions or public conduct of government officials,” Google says on the site.

And that’s the “right to be forgotten”?
Yes — the principle that a person has the right to have their old, inaccurate or irrelevant data erased from servers used in online services, or at least have them made hard to find or see. That applies to photos, videos, text, social-media posts — any personal information at all.

So plain sailing from here?Well, Google will have to make sure that they are valid requests — that’s why it asks for proof of identity and a signature on the form.

“Google often receives fraudulent removal requests from people impersonating others, trying to harm competitors, or improperly seeking to suppress legal information,” it says on the site.

Plus, the BBC says the company told it half of the requests it gets in the U.K. involved convicted criminals.

How does Google feel about it?
Larry Page told the Financial Times he felt Google had been “caught out” by the ruling, in comments that suggested the company had maybe shrugged off the case somewhat.

“I wish we’d been more involved in a real debate . . . in Europe,” the Google CEO told the FT. “That’s one of the things we’ve taken from this, that we’re starting the process of really going and talking to people.”

What was the deciding EU court case about?
Mario Costeja González wanted Google to stop displaying links to a notice in Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia from 1998. The notice was for a real-estate auction to raise funds to cover debts owed by Costeja González, who was unhappy about being haunted by those financial difficulties, even though he’d resolved them.

What did the judges say?
The “operator is, in certain circumstances, obliged to remove links to web pages that are published by third parties and contain information relating to a person from the list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of that person’s name.”

Based on what?
Existing data-protection laws — the 1995 Privacy Directive — cover the individual’s right to have data “forgotten”, the judgment says.

This is “the first time European authorities have ruled on the ‘right to be forgotten,’” Alejandro Tourino, a Spanish lawyer who specializes in mass media issues, told AP.

Does the ruling mean I can get news articles taken down?
It doesn’t sound like it. In fact, the judges refused to order La Vanguardia to remove the auction notice, saying it was “lawfully published”. Even Google would be allowed to keep showing links, if it was in the public interest. Here’s what they said:

“Links to web pages containing that information must be removed from that list of results, unless there are particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life, justifying a preponderant interest of the public in having access to the information when such a search is made.”

Does it apply to any U.S. company?
If they have significant operations in an EU country. Google argued that it had little more than a sales office in Spain and the data work was done elsewhere, the BBC reported. But this didn’t save it in the high court.

“No matter where the physical server of a company processing data is located, non-European companies, when offering services to European consumers, must apply European rules,” European Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding said (somewhat ironically) on Facebook.

Any other zingers for Google?
The court decided it was a data “controller” — the kind of company covered by the law — because it collected, stored, organized, retrieved and displayed it. That dispensed with the argument that because Google was only listing links, and not hosting the embarrassing data itself, it didn’t need to comply.

What did Google have to say?

“This is a disappointing ruling for search engines and online publishers in general. We are very surprised that it differs so dramatically from the advocate general’s opinion, and the warnings and consequences that he spelled out. We now need to take time to analyze the implications,” it told media outlets.

Last year, the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice said Google would not have to remove results linked to personal data.

What are the implications?
Well, there’ll inevitably be a cost to businesses to handle requests to take down data — as well as from changes to their systems.

“It … looks difficult to enforce on a large scale, and may be very disruptive for the functioning of search engines going forward,” Ovum analyst Luca Schiovani said in a statement.

“Involving search engines for something they are not directly responsible for is likely to entail a burdensome cost, especially if the amount of requests of erasure should escalate in the future.”

There’s no estimates around the 1995 directive, though the U.K. has done some calculations around the next planned update to EU privacy law: It believes this could cost British businesses alone more than $600 million a year. No surprise, then, that the U.K. is trying to opt out.

Will countries’ opting-out help businesses?
Reding has already given the idea of dodging the law short shrift.

“The EU is a large market with 500 million citizens. If you want to take advantage of this goldmine, then apply the rules. Facebook and such providers like the one-stop shop. They like the fact that the rules are the same everywhere,” she said in a March 8 letter to the U.K.’s justice minister, reported by The Guardian.

“There’s no opt-out. This is an internal market regulation. It’s a decision that will be taken by majority rule.”

Some commentators think we might end up seeing an exodus of online-service providers from Europe, though others believe the First Amendment and trade agreements in the works could allow U.S. companies carry on as usual.

I guess it means general rejoicing among the anti-corporate crowd?
Not at all. Even Reding has acknowledged there’s a need to balance an individual’s right to privacy with freedom of information.

“The court’s ruling means that, under certain circumstances, information can be removed from search engine results even if it is true and factual and without the original source material being altered. It allows individuals to complain to search engines about information they do not like with no legal oversight,” the Index on Censorship said in a statement posted online.

“This is akin to marching into a library and forcing it to pulp books. Although the ruling is intended for private individuals it opens the door to anyone who wants to whitewash their personal history.”

Other effects could be felt down the line. One drawback (benefit?) is that it could affect employers’ ability to do background screening of job candidates, for example.

Didn’t anyone see that coming?
Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, warned of the risk on his personal blog three years ago

“More and more, privacy is being used to justify censorship. In a sense, privacy depends on keeping some things private, in other words, hidden, restricted, or deleted. And in a world where ever more content is coming online, and where ever more content is find-able and share-able, it’s also natural that the privacy counter-movement is gathering strength.

Privacy is the new black in censorship fashions. It used to be that people would invoke libel or defamation to justify censorship about things that hurt their reputations. But invoking libel or defamation requires that the speech not be true. Privacy is far more elastic, because privacy claims can be made on speech that is true.”

Any other side-effects?
Search results could become “exceedingly strange”, notes James Bell in The Guardian. It could end up that people Googling in the U.S. will be able to see links that have been taken down in the EU, while searchers in Europe can’t. (A similar situation happens with news stories banned from publication in certain countries.) Or maybe, he wonders, small companies with no EU presence can just keep serving up disputed links?

Anything else?
As with Reding’s post above, irony’s not in short supply here. But one particularly sharp one is that — as GigaOm points out — erasure-seeker Costeja González has unfortunately fallen victim to a variant of the Streisand Effect.

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